Restless
by possibilist
Summary: Because sometimes they're not as strong as everyone else likes to believe. RHr drabble, post-DH.


**AN (1)**: Well isn't this just a treat? This is for all of my HP followers, because I know that when you saw I'd posted a new piece you were probably disappointed it wasn't Ron/Hermione, lol :) Don't worry - this is! YAY! I hope you're all doing super great and having a blast at life. :) Anyways, this is just a little drabble (and the title is taken from a gloriously sad Gus Van Sant film - watch it!)... As always, it would make my day if you reviewed. Thanks friends!

**AN (2): **Recommended listening: "Blood Bank" by Bon Iver. (And/or "Get It Wrong, Get It Right" by Feist, because it's totally awesome.)

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><p><strong>Restless<strong>

He tries not to remember this, even years later, but it's something he can't ever forget, not really, no matter how much he really does want to.

When she was being tortured, by the end, when she'd stopped screaming too, he kept desperately shouting her name because he hoped she'd remember him when she died.

...

She's sitting next to Ginny and Luna during Defense Against the Dark Arts, sort of paying attention and sort of thinking about Ron, when someone says the word _Cruciatus_. Her heart starts racing and her fists clench so hard against the desk that her fingers ache, and it's like she can't breathe anymore, and she tries desperately not to scream.

She shoots up from her chair so quickly it clatters to the floor, but she doesn't stop to straighten it - she hurries into the hallways and closes her eyes and _triestriestries _not to remember the smell of her blood against the stale carpet. She's sitting on the floor without remembering lowering herself.

Most of the time, she tries to think it never happened. But the scar's there on her arm and her neck, and it did. _It __did_.

...

She sorts pebbles aimlessly by the side of the lake, into color and size and shape and whether or not Ron could skip them.

Ginny sits down next to her silently, taking a pebble with a raised eyebrow.

"Do you think we'll ever forget?" she asks, and by this she means _Please, __I __want __to._

Ginny rolls the pebble around in her hand, then throws it into the water. "No," she says, even though she knows it means _I __wish __you __could_. "No."

...

Auror training goes well until they deal with Boggarts. In a split second, he sees her on the floor again, except this time her throat's slit open all the way and he thinks it again: _There__'__s __no __way __she__'__s __still __alive_.

He screams her name again and closes his eyes and tries to breathe, and Harry's hands are on his back, and he's saying, "Ron, Ron, it's not real, it's not real!" but he knows it's a lie because it _was_real.

He takes the Floo to Professor McGonnagal's a few minutes later, and when she walks into the office (clean, whole, wearing a uniform, ink smudges all over her hands, _beautiful_), he holds her and just cries.

She doesn't say anything or ask anything or tell him _This __is __silly _or _We__'__re __too __young __for __this_, she just tries to give him as much of herself as she can.

...

They sleep for days after the battle, and when she finally wakes up and realizes she's in a _bed_, not in a tent bunk, she sits on the floor of the bathroom and sobs.

...

The thirty-second time he sees her scar, it's snowing outside, and she's asleep next to him in his old bed in his old room, and there's a startling moment when he realizes that they can never be children again, and his chest aches. He stands and pulls on boots and a coat, and goes outside, and tries to remember what it had been like to make snow angels.

...

Sometimes he sees Fred's body before he falls asleep.

...

"I'm scared," she admits, the night before she starts her internship at The Ministry. "Is that wrong?"

He smiles, running his index finger down her nose, over her lips. "No. That's normal."

...

It's been three years. Some days it feels like longer, others it just feels like yesterday. She's giving a guest lecture at Hogwarts, weirdly enough, on that day, about House Elves, and as the entire Great Halls seems to stare at her reverently (and she knows this is because she's _Hermione __Granger_, not because they all care about House Elves), she thinks of that day and how she'd never been in so much pain and how maybe part of what she'd been fighting for all along was this: No one cared if she was Muggle-born. They cared that she'd saved them.

She smiles and thanks them for being there.

...

"What would you have done if I'd died?" she asks one night, in the dark, softly.

He stiffens next to her. "Gotten killed," he whispers after a while, and then laughs once, without humor.

She nods against his chest and listens to his heartbeat for as long as she can before she finally falls asleep.

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><p>AN: Review? Please? Thanks! :)<p> 


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